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Tag MySQL Conference & Expo

Very short update from my side: I’ll be presenting at FOSDEM in Brussels (1-2 February 2014) and Percona Live MySQL Conference in Santa Clara (1-4 April 2014).

At FOSDEM I will present about Galera replication in real life which is concentrate around two use cases for Galera: adding new clusters to our sharded environment and migrating existing clusters into a new Galera cluster.

At Percona Live MySQL Conference I will present about our globally distributed storage layers. Next to our globally sharded environment we have built a new environment called ROAR (Read Often, Alter Rarely) that also needs to be distributed globally.

Both are interesting talks and I really look forward to present at these great conferences. So if you have the way and means to attend either one: you should!

I’m currently wrapping up last things in the office to be prepared for my presentation about MySQL-Statsd at the Percona Live London conference next week. It will be a revised version of the talk I gave at the Percona Live Conference & Expo in Santa Clara, but this time it will be more focussed to the practical side and, obviously, the MySQL-Statsd daemon we open sourced recently, so if you missed that talk or think a follow up is needed you should definitely attend! Slides will also become immediately available after the talk.

It is great to see the bustrip to the community dinner organized by MariaDB. I did not really mind taking the tube for 17 minutes, but getting a busride in a Roadmaster is obviously a lot more fun and comfortable!

Many thanks to all those who attended my talk at the Percona Live London 2012 conference!
I did put the location in the last slide, but just in case you missed the last slide (or missed my talk) you can find them here:http://spil.com/perconalondon2012

I did receive a couple of questions afterwards (in the hallways of the conference) that made me realize that I forgot to clear up a couple of things.

First of all the essence of shifting the data ownership of a specific GID towards a specific datacenter and ensuring data consistency also means one Erlang process within that very same datacenter is the owner of that data. This does also mean this Erlang process is the only that can write to the data of this GID. Don’t worry: for every GID there should be a process that is the data owner and Erlang should be able to cope with the enormous scale here.

Second of all the whole purpose of the satellite datacenter (all virtualized) is to have a disposable datacenter while the master datacenter (mostly virtualized, except for storage) is permanent. Imagine that next to the existing presence (master or satellite DC) in one country we also expect big growth due to the launch of a new game we could easily create a new satellite datacenter by getting a couple of machines in the cloud. This way our hybrid cloud can easily be expanded either by virtuals or by datacenters. I thought this was a bit too offtopic but apparently it raised some questions.

My opinion of the conference is that it was amazing! The conference was very well organized, the atmosphere was great and I met so many great people that I had a tough time remembering all their names and companies. The contents of all talks were really well balanced and most of the ones I attended were very interesting.

Percona XtraDB Cluster: New HA solution (Thu 11:00 – 11:50)
Percona XtraDB Cluster came to me as a complete surprise earlier this year. I’ve been playing around with it a little bit and now that it has gone GA last week I’m even more anxious to attend this session. I think it could be a good candidate to become one of the building blocks for Spil Games in the future.

Shortly after the MySQL 5.5 upgrade the whole cluster was upgraded with extra ram. This was a nice test to see how differently 5.1 and 5.5 behave when they A) innodb bufferpool is too small and B) when the innodb bufferpool has enough room to fit everything in memory.

The MySQL 5.5 had just the same pattern in terms of disk utilization as the other nodes before (around 30% to 40%) and after the upgrade (4% to 5%), so not much difference at all. However the number of free pages within the bufferpool is significantly lower (about 10%) than on the other nodes. This definitely needs some further investigation.

Apart from that the machine is stable and it seems we will proceed with the upgrade on the whole cluster soon.

A sidenote: I’m happy to announce that I was selected as a speaker at the Percona Live MySQL Conference & Expo in San Francisco, April 2012. I’ll be talking about Spil Games (the company I work for) and how our new architecture will solve or ease up the majority of our database issues.